For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss David DeCoteau’s uncharacteristically sincere romance drama Leather Jacket Love Story (1998).
A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or code-on-computer techniques of more popular animation styles (hand-drawn, stop-motion, and CG, respectively), Leaf made a name for herself on the 1970s art scene by producing short films entirely animated in beach sand. She’d spread her collected sand across an illuminated table, shaping it to represent all figures & settings captured by the camera. The technique was not entirely novel to her heyday, having been used as a texturing effect at least as far back as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 landmark The Adventures of Prince Achmed (largely cited as the oldest surviving animated feature film). Leaf was among the first animators to utilize sand-on-glass animation as her primary medium, however, like a chef who only cooks potatoes or a guitarist who works only in arpeggio; it was an experiment in technical limitation.
It turns out, you can do a lot with the simple manipulation of light & sand. In her early experiments “Peter and the Wolf” (1969) & “The Owl Who Married a Goose” (1976), Leaf finds a freedom from the tyranny of setting & geography in her animated sandscapes. Those folktales are retold in a white, boundaryless void where figures transform from one animal to another as the story demands. The wolves, owls, geese, and children drawn in fine-grain beach sand often lose any & all distinctions between their differing animal bodies, turning into and maneuvering around each other in surreal configurations that would be impossible in any other medium. However, her sand-on-glass project didn’t reach its apotheosis until she adapted Franz Kafka’s most famous novella in the 1977 short “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa.” Her Metamorphosis adaptation is the exact existential bug-transformation crisis you know & love, with the same anything-can-transform-into-anything surrealism of her previous shorts, except with the added limitation of having to actually depict a physical, closed-off setting. It’s her most claustrophobic work in sand-on-glass animation as a result, but its claustrophobic tension is entirely appropriate to the text it illustrates. There’s a muddied, charcoal-drawing style smear to her technique that emphasizes the story’s inherent grime while drawing comparisons between the artist’s solitary production style and her character’s pathetic, socially isolating plight. You cannot fully lose yourself in the story of The Metamorphosis, since the literal fingerprints of the artist conveying it are visible in every gritty frame.
While Leaf did explore other animation techniques, her most recognizable & influential works were rendered in beach sand, to the point where her name is near synonymous with the technique. At least, she was on my mind when diving into the collection of short films animated by Suzan Pitt that are currently hosted on The Criterion Channel. In Pitt’s 2006 short “El Doctor,” her titular hand-drawn doctor ends a drunken bender by hallucinating in the driver’s seat of his car outside a Mexican pub. His blurred vision is overpowered by a gigantic sea creature chasing a man in his impossibly bright windshield, an image illustrated in Leaf’s signature sand-on-glass technique. Later, when the same doctor is visited by an angel, Leaf illustrates the supernatural encounter by scratching that angel directly into the celluloid to accentuate the uncanniness of its image. Notably, this scratching technique was also a favorite got-to for Caroline Leaf’s later career, after she had abandoned beach sand as her primary medium of choice. It’s unclear whether Caroline Leaf was on Suzan Pitt’s mind when making “El Doctor,” but she was certainly on the top of mine while watching it.
Like Caroline Leaf, Suzan Pitt started her animation career with a distinct trademark style before moving on to experiment with other techniques & textures in later works. Her most formidable shorts “Crocus” (1971), “Asparagus” (1979), and “Joy Street” (1995) all reflect her fine-art background as a painter, literalizing the “every frame a painting” cinematic cliché. Pitt would paint her figures on traditional transparent animation cells against a black velvet-style backdrop, but the level of color & detail in her psychedelic fantasy realms far outpaced what you’ll find in the commercial end of the medium. She’s also unconventionally morose for an animator, centering all three of those works on the madness, loneliness, and despair of women isolated in dissatisfying domestic spaces, staring out their windows at the big, scary world outside. In “Crocus,” a woman performs mundane domestic duties like child-rearing, self-primping, and marital sex while occasionally taking breaks to stare out the window and dream of a freer life. In “Asparagus,” a woman struggles to make sense of the alien world outside her window but finds a way to repackage it as a psychedelic stage act for the delight of a bewildered theatre audience. In “Joy Street,” a woman stares at the desolate street life below her window before slitting her own wrists, and is then revived by Fleischer style cartoon characters who relocate her limp body to a Technicolor jungle outside city. All three films feel like funhouse mirror distortions of a lonely, dissatisfied artist’s diary, just as confessional as they are inscrutable, grotesque, and beautiful.
These experiments in form are most compelling in a multimedia approach, something Pitt was aware of early in her career. When her faceless onscreen surrogate puts on a surreal theatrical performance at the climax of “Asparagus,” her audience is rendered in a crude Claymation technique, further alienating the artist from the rest of her fellow citizenry. By the time she incorporated the sand-on-glass and scratched celluloid techniques from Leaf’s work in “El Doctor,” Pitt had already established an anything-goes approach to her animations, incorporating paper dolls, magazine collage, and live actors into her signature fine-art painting style. While Leaf is best known for her work with sand, she also reached her greatest artistic heights when expanding her approach to multimedia techniques — most notably in “Interview,” a short film collaboration with fellow animator Veronika Soul. “Interview” is a dual portrait of the two artists at work, vulnerably gushing about each other and confessing their own personal insecurities while excitedly jumping from one experimental animation technique to the next. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen any filmmaker come to approximating Agnès Varda’s free-flowing autofictional documentary style with any convincing success, and it took two filmmakers working in tandem to accomplish it. It’s also the most I feel like I got to know Caroline Leaf through the content her films, since so much of her most prominent work is more about technique than about personal expression. In contrast, Suzan Pitt lays bare the ugliest, most intimate parts of her own psyche in her signature animations, daring the audience not to look away. Both artists have trapped themselves in an isolating, labor-intensive medium that requires them to work alone in a dark room for untold hours; the difference is largely in whether the proverbial door to that room is locked shut or left open for the audience peer in.
The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.
The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.
The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.
1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.
Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.
All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.
Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976).
32:54 The World Cinema Project 41:09 Chess of the Wind (1976) 1:09:39 Lucía (1968) 1:33:58 The Night of Counting the Years (1969) 1:51:01 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)
My local video store is run as a non-profit, and one of their ongoing community projects is to offer a window display residency. Artists submit their design concepts, and award recipients get the opportunity to actualize their ideas. Right now, that display is a testament to film piracy:
Unless you’re a real cinemaniac, you’ve probably never seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a bizarre forty-three-minute cult film created in 1987 by Todd Haynes. In it, the strife between Karen Carpenter and her (according to the semi-biographical film) controlling brother Richard plays out, with all characters being portrayed by Barbie dolls. Memorably, Karen’s worsening health due to her anorexia is demonstrated by her doll being slowly whittled away. If you have seen Superstar, then the only reason you’ve ever had the opportunity to do so was through piracy. Whether because the use of Barbies does not fall under fair use, because of the presence of contemporary music that is unlicensed, or just because Richard Carpenter raised a big enough stink about it, there’s no way for you to watch this film legally. A copy exists at the Museum of Modern Art, but it is not exhibited. I personally have seen it, and the copy that I watched was on a burned bootleg Maxell DVD-R just like the one recreated in Maura Murnane’s display above.
The question of the ethics of piracy arose recently when I texted Brandon about whether or not we (read: I) should cover the leaked film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a continuation of the animated 2005-2008 Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, following the show’s child characters into young adulthood (some of them had also appeared as elderly characters in continuation series The Legend of Korra). AATLA was set to be released theatrically this year, but Paramount opted to pull the film from its planned cinema release and drop it solely to their streaming service, Paramount+. This announced change ruffled some feathers. Fans who wanted to see the film on the big screen and would have happily paid to do so would now have to sign up for a subscription service to see it, and at a reduced scale than the creators intended; members of the crew and animation teams were likewise disappointed to learn that something that had been created to be visually stunning and grand in scope would not get the opportunity to reach the intended audience. Universally, the decision to paywall the film in the winter was met with criticism. Avatar fans who want to have access to that content are more likely to already be subscribed to Paramount+ in the first place, meaning that the addition of the film to the service would likely have a negligible effect on overall subscription numbers. The money was already spent, there would be no chance for the film to recoup its budget theatrically, and the hellscape that is the current streaming service subscription model grinds on.
In general, although Swampflix and its contributors in no uncertain terms do not recommend piracy, as a legal disclaimer, I’m flexible about what this means for works that are inaccessible due to rights-holders’ choices and decisions. Consolidation of the ownership of all media into a few conglomerates is a bad thing. Even the least cinemanic among us have cottoned on to the fact that every streaming service is less functional, robust, and egalitarian they they once were, and the national government’s antipathy against monopoly prosecution in the death throes of our current economic era mean that it’s only going to get worse. The next inbound round of money-laundering square-dancing means that next year the guy who makes your toothpaste might also own The Little Rascals, or that every time you buy corn chips you’ll be adding a nickel to an account that will eventually fund a live-action Rocko’s Modern Life, or that some anarchocapitalist’s nepotistically inherited pyramid scheme will get to decide whether you can make Dorothy Gale’s slippers ruby or not. The back catalogs of films that are gatekept behind faceless entities are held back not so that said entities can do something with them, but just to keep others from having access.
Or, more frequently in recent years, to cancel huge, completed projects because not releasing them to the public means that they can be written off for tax purposes. It’s far from the worst thing that most of the 1% has done, but like most of their unethical actions, it’s rooted in the seed of all evil: a love of money. A couple hundred internet malcontents with too much time on their hands managed to leverage a global pandemic into browbeating Warner Brothers into releasing a supposed “lost” film at a time when productions were shut down. This emboldened probably the worst people it could have, but it also means that nothing is really set in stone. Three years after its cancellation was announced, Coyote vs. Acme is finally being released this August; maybe there’s even some hope that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl might see the light of day someday. But as Brandon pointed out to me when I texted him, there wasn’t really a good reason to review the animated Avatar film when it had a real scheduled release date, even if its release was a downgrade. That’s a different story.
I won’t reveal the circumstances under which I viewed Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Maybe someone was screening it at a bar, a bar that has since closed down and therefore no one can be held responsible. Maybe I watched it through a storefront window like a kid in a corny Christmas commercial. Maybe someone burned a bunch of copies onto Memorex DVD-Rs and let them fall off of the back of a truck. A full review will come, when the film is legally available. I would recommend that, should the winds change and you get the chance to see it theatrically, it will be well worth the cost of the ticket. As to whether it will be worth the cost of the subscription to Paramount+, only you, dear reader, know if you’re responsible enough to cancel before the renewal date if Avatar Aang is all that you want to see. I’m not entirely sold on the new voice cast (in short, Toph is pretty good, Katara is acceptable, Aang is iffy but occasionally perfect, and—all love and respect to Steven Yeun—Zuko is completely wrong), but the film is absolutely gorgeous. I struggled to adjust to the cast changes and what I perceived as tonal changes, but by the time Aang was soaring around and having a good time, so was I. I had missed him, and it was good to spend time with him again. If anything, Paramount’s bungling of this whole debacle means that it’s unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity again (unless you count the Netflix live action series, which has its own host of problems). Only time will tell.
Until 1956’s Forbidden Planet screened at The Prytania last week, I had only ever watched it as a VHS tape, fuzzed out and color-faded on a squared-off TV screen. It’s easy to take the movie for granted as an Atomic Age sci-fi novelty in that format, where it resembles any number of 1950s space adventures of the Buck Rogers mold. Revisiting it in CinemaScope on the big screen painted a much clearer picture of just how extravagant its production was for that genre. If anything, Forbidden Planet is the Atomic Age sci-fi novelty. Between its flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, mini-skirted alien babes, and Mid-Century Modern decor, it stands as the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi, a perfect specimen. Its influence on all space-adventure sci-fi to follow is also glaringly apparent in retrospect. Within the first five minutes, the Earthling astronaut heroes step into a light-beam transporter device that looks suspiciously like the ones on Star Trek; the yellow text scroll of its original trailer looks suspiciously like the opening prologues of classic Star Wars films. Not for nothing, composers Bebe & Louis Barron’s far-out analog synth soundtrack is also cited as the first feature-length electronic score in movie history, overloaded with futuristic beep-boop sounds that would change the shape of music forever, in cinema and beyond. I was delighted by the Barrons’ opening credit for “electronic tonalities,” since what they were doing with their self-invented gadgetry was so experimental the studio unions weren’t convinced it technically qualified as music. I was even more delighted by the similar credit “introducing Robby the Robot” in that sequence, though, as if Forbidden Planet‘s breakout robo-star was a working actor instead of a movie prop.
Robby the Robot should be familiar to any movie lover regardless of their personal interest in Atomic Age sci-fi or whether they know Robby by name. His image is synonymous with the genre, to the point where he earned the nickname “the hardest working robot in Hollywood” for how often he was referenced in other works. Robby has dozens of acting credits on IMDb, ranging from speaking roles in vintage TV shows like Lost in Space, Twilight Zone, and Columbo to uncredited background cameos in Gremlins, Explorers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and even a few movies not directed by Joe Dante. His continued popularity after his “introduction” in Forbidden Planet was at least partly genuine, since he is an instant charmer in that big screen debut. Robby was introduced to audiences as a kind of robot butler & 3D printer, always available to serve cocktails and fabricate gem-studded haute couture gowns at the simplest request. His flat vocal affect (provided by actual-human actor Marvin Miller) and his overly buff body design also made him an oddly manly screen presence, so bulkily muscular that he had to toddle across the screen like a baby taking its first steps. A lot of Robby’s continued public circulation after Forbidden Planet was an effort from MGM to recoup a return on investment, though, since his construction for his introductory film appearance was exorbitantly expensive, estimated at nearly 7% of the film’s overall budget. That money was put to great use, affording Forbidden Planet a recognizable mascot that could sell tickets with his coneheaded good looks and dry robotic wit, but it was a huge gamble to invest so much of the special effects budget on a single prop. The only way to justify the expense, really, was to put the robot to work.
Without question, the most bizarre ploy to squeeze more return on investment out of Robby’s robo-body came the immediate year after Forbidden Planet, when the sci-fi mascot was once again billed as a big-name actor in the children’s comedy The Invisible Boy. Robby’s second acting credit only does the bare minimum to justify the logic of his screen presence, gesturing towards an offscreen time travel device that connects its 1950s suburbia setting to a future century when Robby could’ve conceivably traveled to Earth after the events of Forbidden Planet. All of this half-baked lore is effectively contained to a single postcard, briefly discussed by the father-son duo who hog most of the runtime. Personally, I prefer to take the opening credits at face value, agreeing to a reality where Robby is a working actor whose appearance onscreen doesn’t need to be narratively justified any more than his human costars’. The important thing is that Robby is given the opportunity to make friends with a young nerd in the American suburbs, offering some direct-to-consumer wish fulfillment for the target audience of sci-fi adventures like Forbidden Planet. Then, a dirty Commie supercomputer hijacks Robby’s programming, temporarily turning him evil and overriding his prime objective to do no harm to living beings. He gets up to increasingly ridiculous, nefarious deeds in his second outing: turning the young boy invisible, kidnapping him to the moon, and getting hit with a military-grade flamethrower for his troubles. Then, he finally snaps out of it and becomes the Robby we all know & love in the final scene. All’s well that ends well, I guess, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the Father Knows Best familial dynamics that continue in the subtly abusive family home Robby invades, in which spankings are frequent and other expressions of parental affection are difficult to come by.
The Invisible Boy is kiddie stuff, but it’s at least memorably deranged kiddie stuff. There’s a brief comedic sequence after Robby first turns his young friend invisible that threatens to run out the rest of the runtime with slapstick hijinks (again, mostly involving unseen spankings). Instead, the movie gets admirably bizarre in its scene-to-scene plotting, diverting attention from Robby’s new homelife to the evil machinations of a treasonous supercomputer, hellbent on ruling the world in an AI takeover by hypnotizing the humans at its controls. That computer is about the size of an average home’s living room, but it’s said to contain the sum total of human knowledge in its memory banks the same way the cavernous underground computers in Forbidden Planet were explained to contain the sum total of space-alien Krell knowledge. Any of The Invisible Boy‘s direct connections to Forbidden Planet could only diminish it in comparison, though, since that bigger-budgeted work was set entirely in a sound stage otherworld (the first of its kind in that regard as well), while the action sequences of its kinda-sorta follow-up mostly amount to military goons firing blanks at its most expensive prop in an open, barren field. Whenever Robby’s not onscreen in The Invisible Boy, the audience is asking, “Where’s Robby?,” whereas he’s just one of many wonders in Forbidden Planet, competing with flying saucers, psychic monsters, and laser battles for the audience’s attention. It sure is fun to imagine what life would be like with Robby hanging around as your big, buff robo-butler as a child, though, which makes the overall appeal of The Invisible Boy immediately apparent. We all wish we could spend more quality time with our good friend Robby, which is partly why he has never truly gone away. He’s always hanging around in the background somewhere, chilling and collecting royalty checks from past acting gigs.
Welcome to Episode #264 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and returning guest Joey Laura to discuss a selection of films from experimental Belgian animator Raoul Servais, starting with his Palme d’Or winning short Harpya (1979).
00:00 Welcome 06:16 Raoul Servais 11:49 Harpya (1979) 20:00 Other works
The biggest shakeup for me on the latest edition of the Sight & Sound Top 100 list was not the much-discussed displacement of Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the #1 slot by Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, but the total elimination of one of the precious few short films on the list: Buñuel & Dalí’s 1920s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou. The only thing that lessened the sting of that loss from the canon-defining list was that another surreal masterwork was added to take its place: Maya Deren’s 1940s follow-up Meshes of the Afternoon. Whereas Un Chien Andalou is a free-association free-for-all that defies any ascribed linear narrative, Deren’s later mutation offers more tangible themes, characters, and progression from scene to scene. Remarkably, it loses none of the dream-logic surrealism in the process, simulating the out-of-body experience of a young woman taking an ill-advised afternoon nap and becoming unmoored from reality as a result. Like Un Chien Andalou, its dreamworld iconography is foundational to the artform, recalling monumental works to follow as daunting & disparate as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Often cited as “The Mother of the Avant-Garde,” Deren collaborated with then-husband Alexander Hammid to translate her artistic background in dance & poetry to reinvent cinema as a medium in works like Meshes. She traveled internationally with her films, staging lectures & debates to reshape public perception of what The Movies are and what they could be. Anyone who watches Meshes of the Afternoon instantly understands her to be one of the medium’s all-time greats, just as worthy of prominence on the Sight & Sound list as Buñuel (who, as of 2022, has fallen off the publication’s prestigious Top 100 list entirely).
So, after years of respecting Deren as one of the all-time greats based on that one title alone, I figured I was overdue to catch up with the rest of her work. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray disc The Maya Deren Collection is as good of a crash course in her greater catalog as any, making for a much clearer, more concise compendium than the Wikipedia articles listing her most notable works among her unfinished projects. After spending an evening with that collection, it’s clear to me that Deren has at least a trio of films worthy of the all-timer status Meshes now enjoys. 1944’s At Land and 1946’s Ritual in Transfigured Time are just as essential to appreciating Deren’s artistry as Meshes of the Afternoon, something Deren seemed to be aware of herself when she screened that exact trilogy under the banner “Three Abandoned Films” in New York City in 1946, in one of her earliest art-scene triumphs. For its part, At Land feels like a direct beach-trip sequel to Meshes, like those TV movie sequels to sitcoms where the cast goes on a tropical vacation. Deren’s dazed everywoman washes up on a mysterious shore, then impossibly sprints through interior & exterior spaces in the exact looping, interpretive-dance logic she puzzles her way through in Meshes. By the time she made Ritual in Transfigured Time, she feels more firmly rooted in New York City, staging an East Coast cocktail party where guests continually move affectionately towards each other but never convincingly make contact — every single interaction belonging in the next day’s “Missed Connections” newspaper column. As a trio, they hardly feel like Deren’s “abandoned films”; they’re by far her most convincingly complete, accomplished works.
The other Deren titles considered to be her major works all register as camera tests, sparks of ideas put to greater use in her “Three Abandoned Films” masterworks. The most stunning of these camera tests is 1945’s A Study in Chorography for the Camera, in which a muscular dancer spins with such precise, relentless fury that he stops resembling a ballerino and starts resembling a multi-faced deity. That ferocity is again echoed in 1948’s Meditation on Violence, which similarly documents & abstracts the dance-like movements of a Wu-Tang style martial artist, teetering on the border between ballet & violence. By the time Deren got to the 1950s, her ideas were less cutting-edge but no less fascinating, culminating in the film-negative outer space fantasia of 1955’s The Very Eye of Night, in which balletic performers are superimposed over the Zodiacal cosmos. Any one of these shorts would kill as a background projection at a hipster house party or a living room punk show, emphasizing visual splendor over theme or narrative. As a group, they feel like watching an avant-garde filmmaker invent the music video as a medium in real time, which is a bizarre takeaway given that they are intentionally silent, with no sound component to match the musicality of their dancers’ movements. The way she manipulates those movements by playing with projection speeds and backwards looping in the edit are interesting as standalone ideas, but those ideas are put to much more coherent use in, say, the backwards tides of At Land or the freeze-frame human statues of Transfigured Time.
The most baffling entries in Deren’s filmography are the ones where sound was added in later edits. Whereas At Land will feature silent footage characters engaging in a vigorous walk-and-talk, 1947’s The Private Life of a Cat has since been edited to include a narration track that explains every action & intention of its subjects. The result practically feels like an industrial or educational short for a 1950s Biology classroom, to the point where it’s confusing to see it listed as an “experimental film” at all. I cannot tell if that designation carries on because of who made it, when it was made, or because of how notoriously difficult it is to work with cats. In any case, Deren & Hammid document the live birth & early parenting of a litter of kittens in their NYC apartment, later ascribed meaning in narration that compares the domesticity of the modern housecat against the ferocity of their wild-predator ancestors. It’s one of the longest titles and also one of the most straightforward, a combination repeated in her final work, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which was completed posthumously in the 1970s. Divine Horsemen looks & sounds like Anthropology 101 homework, documenting the dancing rituals of Vodou religious practices, which became a major interest of Deren’s late in her life. At nearly an hour in length, though, the relentlessness of the dancing does gradually evoke a kind of genuine delirium in the audience, especially if you can tune out the dryly academic narration track added after her death. As Deren’s films got less visually experimental, they paradoxically became more aligned with the ritualism of Kenneth Anger’s work, just with different spiritual interests. She was more interested in Vodou than in cinema, only using the latter to access the physical poetry of the former.
Frustratingly, the rest of Maya Deren’s catalog appears to be unfinished or unpublished in one way or another. I could find no useful information about 1949’s Medusa or 1959’s Season of Strangers other than their online listings in her filmography. Meanwhile, 1951’s Ensemble for Somnambulists did not make the cut for the Kino Lorber disc, but once you watch it on YouTube, the reason for its exclusion is immediately apparent. It feels like an early-sketch camera test for the film-negative space ballet of The Very Eye of Night, which itself is already thinly conceived. The only exclusion from Kino’s Maya Deren Collection that I can really fault is 1944’s The Witch’s Cradle, which pulls on the same artistic strings as her masterful trio of “Abandoned Films.” Unlike that now-canonized trio, The Witch’s Cradle was actually abandoned in that it was left unfinished, but its surviving footage (also available on YouTube) features some of her most strikingly surreal, darkly magical images. Its cloistered apartment setting and yarn-stringed spiderwebs suggest that Deren reworked its basic ideas into the more accomplished & coherent Transfigured Time, but it’s got enough of its own distinct texture & personality that I wish she saw the project through to completion. In general, her filmography feels frustratingly incomplete, since cinema only appears to have been one of her many artistic & spiritual interests, among poetry, dance, Vodou ritual, Leftist labor organizing, and whatever else struck her fancy on the fringes of NYC social life. She pounced on the medium with great ferocity, then wandered away from it like a bored housecat, distracted by her next momentary prey. Even the three great works we got out of her before she moved on were self-described as “Abandoned Films,” a series of dreams that she awoke from, dazed.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Universal’s silent-era adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starring Lon Chaney as The Phantom.
James Dean has been on my mind a lot lately, and not entirely by choice. New Orleans is lucky to now have two weekly repertory programs in Gap Tooth and Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies, where until recently we only had the latter. The two series both operate in their own hermetic headspaces, and their weekly film selections rarely speak to each other in any discernible way. So, it was a little jarring that the same week Gap Tooth screened David Cronenberg’s Crash, in which Elias Koteas restages James Dean’s vehicular death as an act of ritualistic foreplay, The Prytania happened to program Dean’s major bid at traditional movie stardom: the 1955 Steinbeck adaptation East of Eden. This was a coincidence, of course, as the two films are only truly linked in their shared highlight of James Dean as an Old Hollywood icon – a status solidified by Eden and later perverted by Crash. What struck me about that coincidence was a reminder during Harry Griffin’s introduction to East of Eden that Dean had only filmed three major film roles before his shocking death at age 24, two of which received posthumous Oscar nominations after his infamous car wreck. It was simple math, but I couldn’t help but dwell on the equation as the pre-film Looney Tunes short rolled . . . If we had already covered James Dean’s performance in the epic melodrama Giant a couple years back, and I was about to see his most prestigious performance in East of Eden, that means I’d only have one Dean role left to see to complete the trio. Wait a second, how had I gotten that far into his filmography without having seen his most iconic role in Rebel Without a Cause, the one that made him a star? Isn’t it a little weird that I’ve repeatedly watched James Spader get a boner at the thought of Dean’s death in Crash, or Tommy Wiseau whine “You’re tearing me apart!” at top volume in grotesque Dean caricature in The Room, but I’ve never bothered to witness Dean in all of his teen-rebel glory first-hand? I felt some deep shame about this realization all the way through East of Eden‘s blank-screen overture, making a mental note to finish my homework as soon as I got home.
Thinking back on it now, my lack of urgency in catching up with James Dean’s filmography might be that I felt as if I already knew everything I needed to know about him from still photographs. This assumption was, of course, ludicrous. In my mind, James Dean was a cool, laidback bad boy, forever leaning on a nearby tree with a cigarette hanging causally from his lips. That’s what he conveys as a photographic model, anyway: 1950s devil-may-care machismo. His actual movie roles tell an entirely different story. In both Rebel Without a Cause & East of Eden, Dean is a gnarled knot of dorky teenage emotions, more hormones than man. His brow is forever furrowed in some internal debate about what to do with his awkward body next, seemingly always on the verge of sex or violence but choosing to whine in agony instead. His infamous “You’re tearing me apart!” line reading where he contorts his face in Mad Magazine-style caricature arrives mere minutes into the film’s opening sequence, not its emotional climax. We meet Dean as a rich-boy teen reprobate spending the night in his local police station’s drunk tank until his mentally checked-out parents arrive to throw money at the problem, bailing him out. Sure, he looks cool in his iconic red bomber jacket, which director Nicholas Ray transforms into a pop-art fashion piece just as iconic as Dorothy’s ruby slippers or that little squiggle on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt. Dean’sroad-to-ruin antics as a teen rebel in peril are just far more anguished & whiny than you’d expect from the movie’s still frames. Onscreen, he expresses way more of the hormone-addled anxiety of being an actual teenager than he does the idealized teen-rebel cool you’ll see him exude as a still image on dorm room posters. I have to assume that’s a major factor as to why he was so popular with the youth of the era. The basic concept of a “teenager” was a Boomer-generation invention in the wake of WWII, and James Dean was there at ground zero to embody the exact puberty-pained animalism that defines that state of being – just as much of a hormonal monster as The Teenage Werewolf.
There’s some exciting tension in watching Studio System directors like Nicholas Ray & Elia Kazan attempt to match Dean’s off-kilter method actor energy in their filmmaking style. For his part, Ray goes full pop art, blowing up the Roger Corman teen crime picture to blockbuster scale. Elia Kazan is a little more subdued in East of Eden, taking the historical literature origins of its source text just as sincerely & somberly as George Stevens does in Giant. That is, until you get to the scenes in which Dean fights with his father. Surprisingly, East of Eden is just as much of a “Parents just don’t understand!” teen screed as Rebel Without a Cause, except instead of Dean’s internal crisis being triggered by his own participation in a deadly game of chicken, he’s challenged by the discovery that his estranged mother is not, as he was originally told, dead; she’s just the madame of a popular brothel one town over. This puts the sheltered farm boy at direct odds with his overly pious father, who’s always treated him with an unspoken disgust as the product of his mother’s sins. The film is grandiose in scale, using its wide CinemaScope framing to capture the great rural expanse of turn-of-the-century America. Then, in scenes where Dean’s protagonist confronts his father in domestic squabbles, that same CinemaScopic frame feels wildly inappropriate. Kazan (in collaboration with cinematographer Ted McCord) tilts the camera at extreme Dutch angles during their indoor power struggles, matching Dean’s off-kilter emotional state with a literally off-kilter camera. It’s an outright perverse use of the CinemaScope format, especially during a third-act fight when Dean menacingly lunges at his father from a tree-rope swing and the camera see-saws in either direction with every sway. It’s so disorienting that it’s nauseating. Ray pulls a similar trick in Rebel Without a Cause, often shooting Dean from an extreme low angle that emphasizes the potential for violence in his character’s big teenage emotions and newly embiggened teenage body. The fact that Dean was visibly in his 20s playing these roles only makes the images more confusing & grotesque.
All of James Dean’s teenage whininess, awkwardness, and animalistic capacity for violence are front & center in these leading-man roles, and they do nothing to diminish his sex appeal. In East of Eden, he unwittingly woos his brother’s buttoned-up fiancée, who finds herself jealous of the sexual freedom the local “bad girls” get to enjoy while following him around like puppies. In Rebel Without a Cause, he goes out of his way to woo a local bad girl, and he happens to pick up a homosexual admirer along the way in Sal Mineo, who likewise makes puppy eyes at his chosen master. These wayward teenage girls (& boy) sense a kindred spirit in Dean’s open-hearted rebelliousness, admiring the way he expresses their internal emotional torment on his movie-star-handsome exterior. He wasn’t explosively popular because he looked cool smoking a cigarette; he was popular because he was wildly uncool – overheated, even. In retrospect, that makes the perversion of his iconography in Crash even funnier in retrospect, given that Cronenberg’s characters are all deliberately stripped of any discernible human emotion, making them the philosophical opposite of the idol whose death they worship. It’s the rare occasion where one of our weekly local classic movie screenings helped directly inform the other, instead of acting as cross-town counterprogramming. I thought more about James Dean that week than I previously had in my entire life, and I feel like I get him now. I can also now definitively confirm that, yes, East of Eden is his most accomplished performance, if not only because there’s so little competition.
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